The way we have been talking about children and social media has gone wrong, in country after country, and the way we are talking about it now is shaping the policy we are going to end up with. Almost every news story, op-ed, and dinner-table conversation frames the question the same way, as a matter of "banning children from social media," and the phrase has become so familiar that we have stopped questioning it, even though it does not describe what is actually happening or what is being proposed.
What the new laws actually do
What Australia did in November 2024, what came into force there in December 2025, and what the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Malaysia and others are now considering is not a ban on children at all. It is a ban on exploitative platforms accessing children, with penalties of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars falling on the companies, never on children and never on parents. That is a very different proposition from the one most people seem to think is being argued for, and the language we use to describe it is doing a lot of work.
When we say "banning children from social media," we put children at the centre of the sentence and make them the thing that needs controlling, parents the enforcers, regulators the disciplinarians, and the whole policy debate becomes a question of how strict to be with kids. When we say instead "banning exploitative companies from accessing children," we put the companies at the centre and the rest of the picture rearranges itself, with parents now the people whom regulation protects, regulators now a consumer-safety body, and children now the people the law is built to protect. These two framings produce two very different sets of politics, and only one of them is honest about what is happening.
The companies engineered the problem
The platforms in question were not built for children, but they have been carefully designed to capture and hold their attention. Their algorithms are tuned for engagement rather than wellbeing, their notifications timed to interrupt, their streaks built to reward consecutive use, and their feeds engineered to remove the natural stopping points that any other product designed for children would have. The harms are by now well documented, with rising rates of anxiety and depression, sleep disruption, attention fragmentation, body-image distortion, and exposure to content that no child should ever see. Against this backdrop, parents are not failing in some kind of contest of wills with their teenagers. They are facing products designed by some of the most sophisticated behavioural-design teams on the planet, deployed at population scale, in their children's pockets, twenty-four hours a day. Telling them to "set limits" or "have conversations" misses both the scale and the deliberateness of what they are facing, which is why the obligation has to sit where the design choices were actually made, with the companies that built the products and continue to profit from them.
Language shapes who we expect to act
This matters well beyond the level of grammar, because the way we describe the policy shapes who we hold responsible, who carries the cost of getting it wrong, and who is given the tools to act. Sally Hogg of the Start Strong campaign made a parallel point about early-years screen time this month. UK government guidance now advises avoiding screens for children under two, which is sound advice, but Start Strong's focus-group research, conducted by More in Common, found that the public consistently attributes children's screen use to parents rather than to the conditions shaping their choices, with one participant memorably describing "a society of lazy parents." Until that narrative shifts, Sally argues, the political appetite for the systemic action that would actually help families stays low. Her argument and the argument I want to make here are essentially the same. Both are about who we put at the centre of the sentence, and both observe that as long as the children and the parents are the centre, the companies and the conditions get a free pass. And the pattern is not unique to the UK. Wherever the public conversation about children and screens takes hold, the same blame-the-parents narrative tends to dominate, and the same systemic conditions get left out of the frame. Name the companies, name the conditions, and the work moves to where it should sit.
Treating this in pieces
The deeper problem, though, is that we keep treating all of this as a series of separate problems to be solved by individual policy decisions taken in isolation from each other. We pass guidance on screen time without thinking about housing, legislate on social media without thinking about play, exhort parents to do better without considering what is happening to their wages or their working hours or their mental health or their access to community life or their nearest playground or their nearest library, and then we wonder why the same children keep ending up in the same places with the same outcomes. Nowhere is this clearer than in the early years, the most consequential phase of a child's life, where responsibility is split across health, education, social services, local authorities, and a patchwork of private and charitable providers, and where as a result no single minister, department or institution in most countries can truthfully say that the early years are theirs to own. The carrot is offered in one room, the stick is wielded in another, and the children themselves are mostly absent from the conversation that is supposedly about them.
Childhood, in the widest sense
What children actually need is a joined-up, whole-society response to childhood itself, rather than another round of piecemeal carrots and sticks aimed at companies one year and parents the next, or another isolated policy decision taken in a single government department on a timeline of its own with each department quietly assuming someone else is taking care of the rest. Such a response would have to begin from the question of what childhood ought to look like, in this country and in every country, and work backwards from there to what the conditions and the policies and the systems would need to be in order for that childhood to be available to every child, and not only to the ones whose families can engineer it for themselves.
That kind of response would start in the early years, where the foundations of attention, language, social connection, and self-regulation are laid down long before a child has ever seen a screen, and it would take seriously the fact that the first thousand days matter more than almost anything that follows. In the UK, the First 1001 Days Movement has been making this case for years, and similar coalitions are doing the same work in many other countries. The structural answer they all point to has yet to arrive. It would address inequality directly, because, as Start Strong puts it, parents in poor housing whose toddlers do not have safe floor space to learn to crawl, communities without free places to go or play, and parents living with mental health problems for whom a screen is a moment of respite when they are struggling to meet their child's needs are not failing as parents. They are failing as a society, and that is the fact most of our public debate is determined not to face. It would also invest seriously in the rest of community life that has been quietly defunded over the past fifteen years, the libraries and youth clubs and playgrounds and after-school activities and safe streets and free outdoor spaces that used to fill the hours between school and sleep with something other than a feed, and whose absence is part of why a phone fills the gap so easily now.
It would do all of this, crucially, in a way that does not depend on where a child happens to be born. Wales legislates for play, Scotland legislates for play, England, where I live, does not, and that is a national choice we should be uncomfortable with. The wider international picture is just as uneven, with Norway having established the world's first Children's Ombudsman more than forty years ago, in 1981, and the Nordic countries having invested in the early years more consistently than almost anyone else, while New Zealand stood up its own Ministry for Children, Oranga Tamariki, in 2017. Beyond those examples, many other countries have moved on platform regulation while doing nothing to restore the conditions in which a real childhood is possible, and still others have invested in the early years while leaving the platforms entirely unchallenged. The accident of where a child's parents were living when they were born should not determine whether the child gets a childhood worth the name. (For the play half of this argument in fuller detail, see Protect play, protect childhood.)
A Ministry for Childhood
Maybe what every country actually needs, in the end, is a Ministry for Childhood. Not a junior children's portfolio bolted onto an education department, and not a Children's Commissioner who can sound the alarm but cannot pull the levers, but a cabinet-level brief that owns the question of childhood in its totality: the early years above all, education at every stage from preschool to school-leaving, play, community life, screen time, family income, housing, and the conditions of parenting itself.
The early years matter more than almost anything that follows, because the foundations of attention, language, attachment, and self-regulation are laid down long before a child has ever set foot in school, and yet in most countries today no single minister or department can say with any conviction that the early years are fully theirs. Education matters in much the same way, because for most children it is what fills the largest share of their waking hours from the age of five onwards, and because no other policy area touches a child's life as directly, as continuously, or for as long.
A ministry along these lines would have one job: to ask, year after year, whether the country is delivering a childhood worth having, and to insist that every other department, whether housing or work or treasury or health or education or digital regulation, answers to that question rather than works around it. Its authority would not be operational, in the sense of running schools or housing programmes itself, but strategic, in the sense of setting the direction every other department's work has to align with, and, crucially, of taking ownership of the early years that today fall between the cracks.
It sounds grand, and the political economy of standing one up would be hard. But its absence is precisely why we keep ending up with piecemeal answers to a problem that has never been piecemeal, and a Ministry for Childhood would be the most honest institutional expression of the whole-society response that children actually need.
The childhood we owe every child
So the conversation worth having is much wider than the question of whether we are banning children from social media or not. It is about whether we are willing to do the joined-up, whole-society work of holding the companies to account, supporting parents rather than blaming them, investing in the early years, addressing the inequalities that shape childhood from before birth, and rebuilding the community infrastructure that we have allowed to wither. None of those things on its own is enough, which is precisely why none of them on its own can be the answer.
That, in the end, is the conversation we owe every child, wherever they were born and wherever they happen to live.